This small company wants to be Marvel 2.0 — and they just might do it

It was in a cramped, messy conference room overflowing with boxes
and memorabilia. That’s where three men sat across from me
and calmly told me their plan to overthrow two of the biggest
entertainment giants in the world.

Together, the three of them — Dinesh Shamdasani, Gavin Cuneo, and
Russell Brown —represented the corporate leadership of Valiant
Entertainment, a small comics publisher with gigantic ambition.

The soft-spoken yet talkative executive
acknowledges our cramped surroundings in the publisher's small
Midtown West office, where there isn't enough room to house
both the comics the company publishes and all of the people
responsible for putting them out into the
world. "We
want to put the money in places where people can see it."

X-O Manowar is Valiant's
most popular hero — a fifth century warrior brought to the
present with indestructible armor and a bad
attitude.Valiant
Entertainment

They're going to need to, because what the
Valiant team wants to accomplish sounds a little bit
crazy.

That's big talk from a company that isn't
anywhere near the household name as its targets. But Valiant is
already a company full of small miracles.

The Valiant Entertainment of today didn't even exist five years
ago. Before 2012, the Valiant name was a brief yet brilliant
spark in comics history, an early-90s success story founded in
part by former Marvel Comics talent. The comics they published —
which kicked off in 1992 — were a remarkable success, with books
like "X-O Manowar" (a story about a Fifth-Century Visigoth
warrior who finds high-tech alien armor and is thrust into the
present) and "Shadowman" (a jazz-and-voodoo themed supernatural
thriller).

Shadowman is another
Valiant character with a movie in the works.Valiant Entertainment

However, the turn of the century was not kind to the comic book
industry, and Valiant would be shuttered in the early 2000s, the
victim of corporate consolidation.

Then came 2012, and everything changed.

That summer was when a rebooted Valiant, with new
leadership and financial backing, debuted to the comics reading
world with the "Summer of Valiant," a splashy promotion for the
relaunch of the comic book universe first seen in the early 90s.
The company re-introduced its comics — leading with their most
popular character "X-O Manowar" — pretty much from scratch,
slowly rebuilding its fictional universe in a smart, modern way.

High-concept superheroics became sprawling sci-fi epics. Stories
about psychic teenagers became contemplations on addiction and
morality. A "Terminator" -esque action thriller became
fodder for a somber story about humanity and redemption.

And they were all very, very, good.

Almost overnight, Valiant was back in business, and over the past
three years they have turned one of the most unlikely revivals in
comics into an enviable hot streak with no signs of slowing down.
Crazy, right?

The cast of "Harbinger,"
Valiant's rebellious teenage psychic superteam — and a big part
of the publisher's movie plans.Valiant Entertainment

"Our strategy is very simple," says Shamdasani.
"Step one: focus on publishing. Don't bite off more than you can
chew. Focus on quality. Build long term. Step two: Expand slowly.
Slow and steady wins the race. Do quality merchandise, do quality
digital initiatives. [Travel] the convention circuit. Step
three is to go into larger media."

To hear Shamdasani share the secret of Valiant's success is to,
frankly, hear the most common-sense foundation any decent
business is built on. It is not radical. It is not innovative. It
is not very sexy. But it is working, and it looks like it really
is putting the small publisher on track to being within
grasp of its stated ambition: to become "Marvel 2.0."

But there is a murky middle space between
kicking off and sustaining a comic book business and becoming a
household name. Valiant has been remarkably aggressive and
successful with the former — spending much of this year on a
lengthy
convention
tour and making "allies" out of retailers — and becoming
a household name.

"We're in a very fortunate situation," says
Russell Brown, a former Marvel executive and Valiant's
president of consumer products, marketing, and ad sales. "We
don't have to rush anything, we don't have to extract crazy
dollars from people — which sets up a whole chain. If you
push people towards high dollars to participate (and everyone
wants to be a part of Marvel 2.0), the problem is they rush
product to market, it doesn't sell through, then there's a
problem and people say 'Valiant is not working.' So what's the
rush? We're slowly, slowly finding the right partners, in the
right categories — it's a real progression."

As interesting and bizarre as some of these may seem, according
to Brown, they're all carefully selected to put the Valiant name
on quality products that will appeal to the niche they cater to —
and hopefully inspire interest in Valiant.

Then there's the movies.

The centerpiece of the film plan Valiant has announced
so far (there is more in the works) is a five-picture deal
with Sony centered on its "Bloodshot" and "Harbinger" comics —
each franchise will get two films apiece, before crossing over in
a grand finale called "Harbinger Wars."

Bloodshot meets the cast
of "Harbinger" in the explosive "Harbinger Wars" crossover comic
— and the finale to the company's first leg of its film
push.Clayton Henry/Valiant
Entertainment

However, the sort of interconnected movie universe pioneered
by Marvel Studios is a thing that lots of studios
want in on — and not
just for comic book characters.

But audience fatigue is not something Valiant is all that
worried about.

"They have elements of the superhero genre;
certainly the iconography and conventions," says Shamdasani, "But
they're built to be in genres that aren't 'superhero'
... You can also see it in our film
choices. Fans ask why not X-O Manowar — he's the biggest,
largest-selling character."

"Bloodshot's a character that's more easily
adapted to a film genre," Shamdasani continues. "It's something
that a larger audience can look at a trailer and understand
'Okay, I've seen films like this before. I've seen 'Terminator,'
I've seen 'Robocop,' I've seen 'Total Recall,' I've seen 'Die
Hard.' I know what something like this is going to be, and it's
something I can get behind."

But it's not just about positioning their comic
book characters as something that filmgoers are already
interested in, according to Shamdasani. There's also the creative
decisions — like hiring Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, the
directors of the excellent sleeper hit "John Wick" — that combine
with smart positioning to result in a more interesting
whole.

The directors of the Keanu
Reeves action movie "John Wick" will be responsible for bringing
"Bloodshot" to life in theaters.Lionsgate

"We oftentimes relate
back to our approach in the comic book world in how we're going
to approach the film world, in that the creative and quality of
the product has always been at the forefront and the most
important thing that we do," says Gavin Cuneo, Valiant's Chief
Operating Officer and CFO. "That's the way we're approaching
films as well."

In the next few weeks, the Valiant team will be moving out of
those tiny offices to a space with enough room to have more
of its team working together. It will be their fourth move in
just as many years.

It's a weird sort of real-life parallel to Valiant's rise as
an entertainment company — unassuming, always moving, and
unusually grounded for the comics industry. A place that runs off
a carnival barker's energy, forever selling the promise of
something you've never seen before and is quite often something
you have.

Archer and Armstrong is a
buddy comedy about an immortal drunk and a fundamentalist
assassin (It's weird. But funny).Valiant Entertainment

"We're a different type of universe than the
ones that are out there — we were created more recently, which
means we more accurately reflect the world that we live in
today," says Shamdasani. "[These characters] are not
necessarily superheroes, they don't have capes and secret
identities ... there's much more
diversity, more big female characters, much more diversity in
race, religion, creed. All because the universe was created in
the 90s, where it was a more diverse world we were living in, as
opposed to reflecting the 60s when Marvel was created, or the
30s, when the DC universe was created."

Much of the virtue behind Valiant Entertainment's work is
bolstered by one important fact: They're small. In their version
of the old story, David didn't beat Goliath with a lucky stone's
throw, but by moving faster and wearing out their larger, slower,
all-consuming competition.

If Valiant is successful, then it too will be big — and with that
bigness will come a whole new set of problems to solve.

"Our challenge, I think, is one thing: I think
it's just time," says Shamdasani. "The original Valiant set up
the foundation, we're picking up the ball and running with it.
Our goal is to tell as many great stories, one comic at a time,
brick by brick — for as long as we can."